LANDFIRE’s Biophysical Settings(BpS) tell many stories-where ecosystems were likely to occur historically, how they looked and functioned. Officially BpSs are:
“A modeled representation of the vegetation system that may have been dominant on the landscape prior to Euro-American settlement and is based on both the current biophysical environment and an approximation of modeled past disturbance regimes. LF uses BPS to depict reference conditions of vegetation across landscapes.”
In these reports we do quick summaries of the BpSs and their associated historical fire regime attributes for each National Forest to:
From a quick assessment of the BpSs and their historical Mean Fire Return Intervals for Sequoia National Forest we found:
Overview chart to explore historical fire regime patterns
The ‘strip chart’ below is intended to introduce the charts that follow.
The BpS dataset includes multiple attributes including:
You can download the raw attribute table here and the data dictionary here.
For the charts and data table below we added some additional calculations such as annual acres burned by fire severity.
Also see below for FRI_ALL “All Fires” calculation
The chart below indicates the total area (in acres) per Biophysical Setting and “All Fires” Mean Fire Return Interval (years, in parentheses). Colors set to match those of the map on the home page, and of the strip chart above.
The above chart depicts how much of each BpS was on the landscape. The chart below depicts modeled annual acres burned per BpS.
The chart below depicts Mean Fire Return Interval per Biophysical Setting, split out by fire severity.
As noted above for the charts and data table we removed some columns (e.g., color ramp), added some calculations (e.g., annual acres burned) and renamed the columns for easier work in R and for clarity. Below you can filter, sort and explore the data. In the following table:
LANDFIRE used the annual probabilities in the original modeling (see Blankenship et al., (2021) for more information). Below is an example of how the math works:
Example calculation of MFRI and annual acres burned for a 1,000 acre ecosystem with a 0.2 annual probability of fire:
\[
MFRI = 1/0.2 = 5ys
\]